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Cooking Without a Recipe: Tomato Sauce

Italian sausage and peppers in a rich tomato sauce

As someone who teaches canning lessons, I often get asked about canning tomatoes. My answer is usually that I don’t recommend it. The exception to my rule is if you grow your own tomatoes. If you grow tomatoes in your garden and have a surfeit come [...]

Cooking Without a Recipe: The Big Salad

When I don’t spend the afternoon chauffeuring my kids between multiple activities and when my husband is not out of town, I really enjoy cooking a nice dinner. Just this week, I made penne pasta soup with vodka, tomatoes and cream and a white turkey chili with tomatillos. Unfortunately, the magical combination of events [...]

Cooking without a Recipe: Brisket

Slices of brisket in a rich gravy

This past week marked the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah. Last year at this time, I wrote a post about enjoying Rosh Hashanah dinner with my friend and fellow blogger Vanessa AKA Chef Druck and I shared my recipe for sweet carrot tzimmes — the vegetables cut into [...]

Cooking without a Recipe: Chicken Pot Pie

Chicken pot pie with a biscuit crust

I grew up in a house where dinner did not come out of a box or the freezer. My mom cooked meals from scratch and actually my brother and I longed to try the exotic products that we saw advertised on television, like Stove Top stuffing or Rice-a-Roni. (To this day, I have never [...]

Cooking Without A Recipe: Beef Stew

Beef stew made my way

In one of my first posts on this blog, I defined what I like to call “the confident home cook:” someone who, like me, has no professional training, but is nonetheless a good cook and moves about the kitchen with ease and – dare I say it? – joy. One of the defining [...]